A few
years ago, Peggy asked to meet with me. Life
had taken a bad turn, and she needed to talk.
When we got together later that day, Peggy explained what was going on
and told me how mad she was at God. With
anger in her voice, Peggy recalled how her family faithfully attends Mass every
Sunday, sings in the choir, and volunteers in several church ministries. “What more do we need to do?” she shouted. “Where is God now when we really need him? I feel like God just left us to deal with all
of this alone.” Pausing to dab a tear
from her eye, Peggy sighed and said, “Well,
thank God we have our friends. They haven’t left us. They’ve been so good to us during all of this,
bringing us food, driving us to doctors and spending time with us.” After a moment of awkward silence, Peggy turned
to me for my response. I said, “Thank God,
indeed. Who do you think sent them?”
I feel so blessed to live in a
country that sets aside a day to give thanks.
There’s no shortage of things to lament about in our lives, so it’s
especially important to take a moment to focus on what we’re grateful for. Gratitude isn’t just saying thank you every
once in a while. Gratitude is having a
positive attitude about a benefit we’ve received. It’s an immediate, crystal clear sense of how
fortunate we are. As jazz great Lionel
Hampton once said, “[g]ratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not
in the mind.”
You know, there’s a reason why the
word thanks, thanksgiving and related words appear in the Bible over 150 times[1]
– gratitude is downright good for us! Studies
have shown that people who express gratitude experience deeper levels of
happiness, fulfillment and well-being.
Gratitude reminds us of the positive things in our lives. Every time we’re grateful, we relive the
benefit we received over and over again.
Gratitude helps us discover the good that always seems to arise out of bad
and reminds us of what’s important in life.
The key to experiencing the
benefits of gratitude is making the conscious choice to be grateful. It’s all too easy to cling to the negative
things in our lives because to some extent we find a little comfort in
them. A “woe-is-me” attitude often attracts
the sympathy and attention we seek. But
after a while, that attitude gets old.
Like the Saturday Night Live skit,
people ultimately run away from the Debbie Downers in our lives. It’s a survival instinct. Grateful people, by contrast, have the opposite
effect. We flock to them and can’t let
them go. Grateful people bring God’s
blessing and grace into our lives, and when we’re grateful, we do the same for
others. When we’re grateful, people want,
no, need to be around us.
Choosing to live a grateful life
begins and ends with God. All good
things come from God – our lives, our family, our friends and everything we
need to live a happy life – so we owe God our unending gratitude. As the German theologian Meister Eckhart so
aptly put it, “If the only prayer you say in your life is ‘thank you,’ that
would suffice.” I’ve personally found
that beginning my day with a small prayer of gratitude – usually as simple as, “Thank
you!” – is just what I need to face life’s challenges armed with a glass that’s
at least half full. And I’m a happier
person for it, because “[y]ou cannot be simultaneously grateful and unhappy.”[2]
That’s what happened to Peggy. On hearing my words, Peggy froze and stared
at me intently. I didn’t know if she
were going to slap me or hug me. Slowly,
a wry smile graced the corners of her mouth like a phoenix rising from the
ashes. She said, “I guess you’re
right. God hasn’t left us after all. Thank God!”
Happy Thanksgiving!
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